Meet NOM’s Newest Anti-Gay Chairman: John C. Eastman

September 22, 2011 5:02 pm ET by Carlos Maza

Today,
National Organization for Marriage (NOM) announced that Maggie
Gallagher has stepped down as chair of their
group. She has been replaced by Dr. John C. Eastman, law professor at Chapman University
School of Law and Founding Director of the conservative Center for
Constitutional Jurisprudence.

Unfortunately,
her replacement isn’t exactly an improvement. John Eastman has a long,
disturbing history of anti-gay animus. Here are just a few examples:

Eastman
Called Homosexuality A Form Of “Barbarism.”
In 2000, Eastman published a column
for The Claremont Institute in which he called homosexuality one of “two new
indicia of barbarism” in the 20th Century:

In
1856, the Republican Party — the party of Abraham Lincoln — included in its
platform a stinging criticism of slavery and polygamy, referring to the two
institutions as the "twin relics of barbarism." Slavery was barbaric
because it deprived some human beings of their liberty, one of the unalienable
rights bestowed on all men, all human beings, by our "Creator," to
use the words of the Declaration of Independence. Polygamy was barbaric
because, as the Supreme Court later recognized, it undermined the concept of
marriage, an institution that is necessary for a free society and therefore
essential to the consensual government necessary to vindicate the unalienable
rights described in the Declaration.

Before the 19th Century closed, America put an end to both relics of barbarism.
Yet in their stead two new indicia of barbarism arose during the 20th Century:
abortion and homosexuality. The parallel between the new barbarism and the old
is uncanny. Abortion is barbaric because it deprives some human beings of a
right even more precious than liberty, the right to life itself — the first of
the unalienable rights recited in the Declaration of Independence. And
homosexuality, like polygamy, has for centuries been thought to undermine the
institution of marriage and the civil society that rests on it.

Eastman
AdvocatedFor The
Abolishment Of Governments That Support Marriage Equality. During the 2010
California Republican Assembly convention, Eastman told a crowd of people that
Americans have the right to respond to “insufferable” government policies like
same-sex marriage by “rising up and abolishing those governments.”

Eastman
Opposed Same-Sex Parenting. Eastman
claimed that studies demonstrating that gay parents can
raise children are “political driven” and have been “pretty solidly rebutted”:

The social science we have on gay couples is relatively in
its infancy. There are some early studies out that, quite frankly, are
politically driven, methodologically flawed and have been pretty solidly
rebutted. But there is no serious study that comes out one way or another on
that question, and therefore it's an open question, whether there's something
about this particular relationship that might mirror the one history has told
us is the norm through all these times. What are the consequences if we get
this wrong, and why is it so important to listen?

Eastman Defended
The Boy Scouts’ Discrimination Against Gays And Lesbians. Eastman has been
a vocal
defender of the Boy Scouts right to discriminate against gays and lesbians:

The Boy Scouts of America, as an
institution, believes that homosexuality is wrong, just as it believes that
adultery and premarital sex are wrong. It exists, in part, to foster those
beliefs among the boys whose parents involve them in scouting and to teach boys
respect for family as the cornerstone of civilized society. Its mission in this
regard is consistent with the teachings of most major religions and in accord
with the law of most civilized peoples throughout history. The Boy Scouts has
been immensely successful as an organization in no small measure because it has
remained true to the moral teachings that have shaped its purpose from its
beginning nearly a century ago. It seeks to instill in the next generation of
our citizenry the kind of moral virtue that our Founders thought so essential
to the perpetuation of our republican institutions and ultimately our
freedom.

The attack on the Boy Scouts is grounded in the claim that
their position on homosexuality is nothing but a bigoted, homophobic relic of
the past. The cultural elites who launched this assault have essentially
redefined our understanding of virtue or, worse, claimed that there is no such
thing as virtue. For two centuries, though, the people of this nation and their
courts have had little difficulty recognizing the meaning of the term virtue
taught by the Boy Scouts, as well as its opposite—at least in nonmarginal case.

Eastman
Advocated In Favor Of Vacating Judge Walker’s Prop 8 Decision. Eastman
wrote in favor of vacating former district judge Vaughn Walker’s decision in Perry
v. Schwarzenegger, arguing that he was a “direct beneficiary” of his
decision to strike down Proposition 8 because he is
gay:

Walker's admission requires that his decision in the case be
vacated. He is either a direct beneficiary of his ruling in the case, or a
person with a close-enough personal interest in the case that his impartiality
might reasonably have been questioned if the required disclosures had been
made. In Liljeberg vs. Health Services Acquisition Corp., the U.S. Supreme
Court held that vacatur is required even when the disqualifying relationship
only became known to the parties 10 months after the judgment entered in the
case had been upheld on appeal. Where an objective observer would have
questioned the judge's impartiality, recusal is required, and the appropriate
remedy is to vacate the judgment because of the risk of injustice to the
parties and of undermining the public's confidence in the judicial process.

Eastman
Defended State Anti-Sodomy Laws. In an article
published in the Brigham Young University
Journal of Public Law, Eastman warned that the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence
v Texas (2003), which struck down state laws criminalizing gay sex, was
wrongly decided and would eventually lead to the legalization of polygamy:

The damage from Goodridge
and Lawrence is more far-reaching
even than this, however. As I said, by pretending that there is no rational
basis for the long-standing Massachusetts marriage laws or the long- standing
Texas prohibition against sodomy, the Goodridge
and Lawrence courts actually applied
some unspoken form of strict scrutiny. Once that proposition is firmly
entrenched, a number of other existing restrictions on whom one can marry, or
how many one can marry, would likely fall as well.

Eastman
went on to call Lawrence a “despotic” decision that should “give us all
pause for concern”:

Whether one agrees with Goodridge and Lawrence or not, surely
it is evident that a judiciary powerful enough to impose such rules is also
powerful enough to impose the opposite rules whenever it strikes their fancy.
The despotic nature of the action itself, rather than the particular action
taken in any given instance, should give us all pause for concern.

If
Eastman’s past statements are any indication of the direction that NOM hopes to
moving towards in the future, Gallagher’s departure is anything but cause for
celebration.